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There are some new patch notes giving us some news — and good news for a change!

Hunters are getting a new baseline ability, Counter Shot, which is an interrupt. Yes, all hunters will have a baseline interrupt now, on a 24-sec cooldown.

Silencing Shot will be MM-only, and will replace Counter Shot for MM. Thus MM gets a better Counter Shot (interrupt plus silence), but not two interrupts, which is fair enough.

Stampede looks like it’s being changed so that the pets continue to cause 25% damage in Arneas and Battlegrounds, but do 100% damage in PvE. This is good news!

Of course, as always, this is still the PTR and still subject to change. Got fingers crossed that Readiness is not removed from the game as they’re talking about now, and is not nerfed to the ground like it is on the PTR. After all, I’ve got a bet with Euripides on this — there’s a friendship bracelet on the line!

While I love the feel of double bestial wrath, they’ve never been able to balance. In general I prefer a cd-based rotation with proc watching in terms of our trinkets/set bonuses. So it would unfortunate if they got rid of this for MM and BM. I think at some they need to just revert it back to MM only. I am not sure though how to compensate BM with and how not to turn in back to its late wrath/cataclysm form. Rift went the opposite direction with their version of readiness from being limited to apply to all abilities in its soul tree.

The instinct was right — they need to make MM be special again. When they made a bunch of MM-only abilities baseline or talents, of course it reduced the reasons to pick that spec, and it also over-powered BM relatively speaking (since little of BM’s extra power was shared with the other specs).

But hunters need a baseline interrupt; almost all classes have one.

The Stampede changes here also make sense. Don’t nerf it for PvE just because it causes PvP problems.

I think Readiness needs to be MM-only again too; it’s the double Bestial Wrath that unbalances things. Perhaps make a defensive-only version baseline, and give MM the whole thing?

And why pray tell should MM be made extra special? They already have so much awesomesauce in self heals with Chimera Shot as well as Aimed Shot, currently Binding Shot which will soon be traded for Silencing Shot. If it wasn’t for the spec’s past clunkiness I would perhaps have considered playing it but I abhor MM. In the past they also had Readiness. I could never get my head around why MM always had all the coolest abilities previously. I rejoiced when Blizz started sharing the love for BM and SV but now it seems they are falling back on their previous changes and want to make MM the be all and end all of the hunter class. Here’s an idea, make MM unique by taking away their pet and then let them have their shiny abilities…

I actually really like that idea about making MM petless. Sometimes I just hate that little $h@t and all their bugs and just drop my pet in alot of cases n e way. (usually running older stuff for transmog is where I have problems)

As long as I’m dreaming, and people are discussing making MM unique again… How about SV? Both other specs have a self heal above and beyond disengage with BM sprit mend (yay spirit beasts) and MM chimera shot awesomeness. SV does not. Both BM and MM have meaningful or at least spec specific major glyphs. SV does not. I’d love to see my favorite spec be as unique as the other two.

You forget that MM has the only actual self-heal without speccing into talents or relying on a pet. Again one would have to take the Liberation glyph for the heal through disengage and AFAIK its not mandatory for pve or pvp. There are still more optimal glyphs out there. I agree that Blizz are treating SV like the bastard son at the moment. It really needs some love. I was doing arena with a MM hunter the other day and we came up against a SV hunter and the MM said he felt for the poor sod running SV.

Sorry to go off topic here but this really bothers me. Either something is unique or its not. It can’t be slightly unique or very unique, or as unique as something else. My intent is not to be mean or belittle just bothers me when people try to re-invent the meaning of a word.

Yesterday on the PTR there was a “bug” where my hunter friend saw reduced cooldowns to all his spells (e.g. BW 42 sec, stampede 3.5min, numbers might be a little off), at least in the tooltips. however this was gone upon relogging and i never saw anything in the like on my account.

don’t really think so. besides, It will be a lot more useful for classes which get their raid CDs lowered, like rogues smoke bomb. Also it will be useful for BM, but it will be really bad for MM/SV, where only BA benefits from it. All specs benefit from the lower CD on Stampede, but fight length will be the factor determining if it is a DPS improvement at all

You lost your bet (as of right now) frost :(
Latest patch notes (7/12/2013) show that readiness has been removed, with Disengage and Deterrence receiving 2 charges, Stampede now does full 100% pet damage outside of Arenas and Battlegrounds.

I think it works where each ability can be used twice before incurring the cooldown. I imagine each charge regenerates on the ability’s base cooldown, so if you use it once, you have one charge left, and the other charge’s cooldown starts. If you use it again, the ability cannot be used until the first charge’s cooldown finishes, at which point you will have one charge again, followed by the second charge’s cooldown starting.

Guess we’ll have to see. I am extremely disappointed that blizzard decided that removing readiness was their best option, and continues my belief that hunter qol and pve concerns are being completely subsumed into futile attempts to balance pvp. It’s very disconcerting.

the charge solution is much, much better for us though. without the cooldowns being tied to readiness, we’re free organise our cooldwns without having to worry about readiness. this is of course important in pvp, but very useful in pve too.

imho, it is also good that they removed readiness as a dps cooldown, as it meant a lot of button smashing. of course i’m expecting a full dps compensation, which we partly got already with the stampede change.

You know what… I had some strange “this was too easy” feeling when the interrupt finally got baseline more or less (which is still good news). Kind of what’s the rub feeling. I guess it should scare the hell out of us if they soon announce the comeback of Readiness or 100 stable slots or anything.

Talking about destructive changes no one can imagine… Wouldn’t it be a quite perfect time to adjust the name “Survival” to reality? As far as I understand it remains for nostalic reasons. Or it’s the dev’s in-joke nowadays. Survival is the worst option to survive as long as I can remember (about four years of hunting). Let’s just call it “Bombardement”, “Trapmastery” or something less misleading.

The reckon the charges on Deterrence and Disengage will work pretty much the same as Charge for Warriors with the ‘two charges’ talent in the first tier, where once consumed it will incur a CD of 12 seconds for each charge, as is my understanding and would work quite nicely. R.I.P Readiness.

Removing readiness leaves a lot of potential to break us. I just wish they had waited until a beta for this much change. They did something similar to mages earlier and in the end it took them awhile in live to sort out the mess with bombs.

+ The BW effect longer but same CD so PvP simply loses the Readiness trinket break but burst can be high, then that’s good. Of course front-loading it somehow would be nice for the initial burst. In an ideal world BW would be twice as long, and KC, ExS, Chimera would have shorter CDs so when they are cheaper or when we have extra focus from focus fire, we can hit them more often. It would change our world from managing cooldowns to managing focus, but that might be a better and more interesting situation.

+ Camo, Deterence, Disengage, Feign Death should all have two charges and the same CD that loads the charges. Right now it’s just on Deterence, but we could and do use it for all.

+ Rapid Fire either charged – or – a little longer with a little shorter CD.

Then we’ll be fairly pretty. It will be different, but we may come to feel it handles better.

It was a SEO test — I was demonstrating that keyword in the URL was more valuable than one keyword in the copy of the page. So I used a word that had no results, to make things clear, and made two posts of about the same word count. One had the word in the URL, but nowhere on the page. The other had the word on the page, but not the URL.

The post with the word in the URL ranked first — at least until someone’s RSS fed sidebar linked to the other one (links are, of course, a vastly stronger ranking factor).

So what you need to do now, Frost, is GIVE the word a meaning–indeed, a full-on dictionary definition–related to your use of it. A natural side effect of this will be forcing others to find another word for the same purpose, but subsequent words would be referenced as Snivbellieates!